Unclear and Present Danger Jamelle Bouie and John Ganz

In this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched the 1996 sci-fi action thriller Independence Day, written and directed by Roland Emmerich and starring an ensemble cast of Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Mary McDonnell, Judd Hirsch, Robert Loggia, Randy Quaid, Margaret Colin, Vivica A. Fox and James Rebhorn, among many others.

In Independence Day, humanity makes its first contact with an alien race. What follows is one day of destruction, one of despair, and one day where the human race, led by the United States, fights back. Jamelle and John use the film to discuss the triumphalist American optimism of the 1990s as well as the political afterlife of the imagery of the film, which extends into the post-9/11 era.

For this week’s episode of the podcast, we watched Star Trek: First Contact, the eighth movie in the Star Trek film series and the first film in that series to focus solely on the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

First Contact stars Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Levar Burton, Gates McFadden, Brent Spiner Marina Sartis, Michael Dorm, Alfrie Woodard, Alice Krige and James Cromwell. It was directed by Frakes with a score by Jerry Goldsmith.

In First Contact, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of Enterprise races through time to Earth’s past to confront the Borg, a cybernetic hivemind that has gone back to humanity’s moment of first contact with an alien species in order to destroy the Federation and change the future. Picard and his team must fight two battles. On Earth, they must ensure First Contact. On the Enterprise, they must defeat the Borg, who have taken root on the ship.

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Courage Under Fire, a 1996 war drama directed by Edward Zwick and starring Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan, as well as Lou Diamond Phillips, Matt Damon, Michael Moriarty and Bronson Pinchot.

In Courage Under Fire, Denzel Washington plays Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Serling, an army tank commander who accidentally fires on and destroys one of his own tanks during a nighttime battle in the closing days of the Persian Gulf War, killing his best friend in the process. The Army covers up the details and assigns Serling to a desk job, where he is tasked with investigating and determining whether a solider should receive the award for which they were recommended.

He is assigned the case of Captain Karen Walden, the commander of a Medevac Huey helicopter sent to rescue the crew of a Black Hawk helicopter. She was killed in the line of duty, saving both the lives of her crew and those of the downed helicopter. The Army, and the White House, wants to give her the Medal of Honor.

As Serling interviews the men involved in the incident, he notices inconsistencies in the testimonies of Walden’s crew. Some praise her strongly, others say she was a coward. Still others testify to events that cannot be confirmed.

Under pressure from both the White House and his commanding officer to authorize the award — and struggling with PTSD from his experiences on the battlefield — Serling resolves to discover the truth of the matter, even if it costs him his career.

The tagline for Courage Under Fire was “In wartime, the first casualty is always truth.”

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched the 1996 science fiction conspiracy action thriller Chain Reaction, directed by Andrew Davis — whose previous UnclearPod films are The Package, Under Siege and The Fugitive — and starring Keanu Reeves, Morgan Freeman, Rachel Weisz, Fred Ward, Kevin Dunn and Brian Cox.

Chain Reaction revolves around a group of scientists at the University of Chicago who are working to convert hydrogen from water into clean energy. They find their breakthrough when their machinist, Eddie Kasalivich (played by Reeves), discovers the secret — a sound frequency that stabilizes the process. Later that evening, a group of mysterious assailants kill the lead scientist and destroy the laboratory. Kasalivich, who had returned to retrieve his motorcycle after escorting Dr. Lily Sinclair (Weisz) home, is the only witness.

When the FBI arrives to investigate, they zero in on Kasalivich and Sinclair as their chief suspects, goaded along by the mysterious presence of advanced technology in Kasalivich’s apartment and evidence of espionage in Sinclair’s. With the help of Paul Shannon, the leader of the Chicago project, they escape the clutches of law enforcement only to find themselves fleeing the armed agents of a secretive industrial group.

As Kasalivich and Sinclair race against time to uncover the mystery of the explosion, and clear their names of wrongdoing, they realize that their scientific breakthrough is a threat to some very powerful people, and that their friends aren’t who they seem to be.

You can find Chain Reaction to watch on demand on HBO Max and also to rent or buy on Amazon and Apple TV.

We’ll see you next in two weeks when an episode on Courage Under Fire, the 1996 legal drama directed by Edward Zwick and starring Denzel Washington, Meg Ryan, Lou Diamond Phillips and Matt Damon.

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched “A Time to Kill,” Joel Schumacher’s 1996 adaptation of a 1989 John Grisham novel by the same name.

Starring Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson and Matthew McConaughey, with supporting performances from Kevin Spacey, Oliver Platt, Charles S. Dutton, Ashley Judd, Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland and Chris Cooper, “A Time to Kill” concerns the trial of Carl Lee Hailey, a black man on trial for capital murder after killing the two men who assaulted his 10-year-old daughter.

When Jake Brigance, a white lawyer who previously defended Hailey’s brother, takes the job to keep Carl Lee out of the execution’s chamber, the small Mississippi town of Canton, where the film takes place, is plunged into chaos. Brigance and his team must navigate national attention, a skilled and ambitious prosecutor, and a revitalized Ku Klux Klan, willing, able and eager to derail the trail and stop Brigance by any means necessary. All the while, Brigance must handle the strain on his family and his marriage.

The official tagline for “A Time to Kill” was: “A lawyer and his assistant fighting to save a father on trial for murder. A time to question what they believe. A time to doubt what they trust. And no time for mistakes.”

You can find “A Time to Kill” to rent or buy on demand at iTunes and Amazon.

For our next episode, we’re watching “Chain Reaction,” a science-fiction thriller directed by Andrew Davis and starring Morgan Freeman and Keanu Reeves.

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched “Johnny Mnemonic,” a 1995 cyberpunk action film directed by Robert Longo and adapted from a William Gibson short story of the same name, by Gibson himself. “Johnny Mnemonic” stars Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren, Takeshi Kitano, Ice-T and Dina Meyer.

In “Johnny Mnemonic,” Keanu Reeves plays Johnny, a “mnemonic courier” who transports sensitive data for corporations via storage implant in his brain. He takes a job that requires him to store too much memory, threatening his life if he can’t make the delivery as quickly as possible. While getting the data, his clients are attacked and killed by the yakuza. Johnny goes on the run, where he is betrayed by his handler, befriended by Jane, a cybernetically-enhanced bodyguard, and brought to the attention of the Lo-Teks, an anti-establishment group.

They discover that the data Johnny holds is a stolen cure to a technological disease that afflicts much of the planet. The creator, a mega-corporation called Pharmakom, refuses to release the cure because they are profiting off of the treatments. As Johnny is hunted by hired assassins for Pharmakom, he and his allies fight to disseminate the cure and save Johnny’s life.